Kickball - Week 10...

Half our team didn't even show up again this week, including our pitcher.  It was hot, humid, and buggy out there last night, and, unsurprisingly, we got our asses handed to us, again.

POSITION:

          -once again, traded innings with the old guy out in left field - he originally had me out there the
           whole game, and had two of the girls trading innings, until someone pointed out that according
           to league rules, that would be mean we wouldn't have enough girls in the field every inning - so
           the girls got to play the whole game, and I only got to play half the game

          -one ball got kicked along the ground into left field, and I ended up having to run for it - trying to
           get it back to the infield to stop the runner heading for Home, I only managed to throw it an
           embarrassing ten feet (that ball is so big, and so light, that it's basically impossible to throw it
           with any distance or accuracy, unless you have gigantic, basketball-player hands - which I do
           not) - the runner ended up scoring easily

          -in the last inning, a ball was kicked right to me - perfect arc, straight to my chest - I didn't
           even have to take a single step in any direction - all I had to do was not drop it - and I
           FINALLY managed to do something right! - I caught the fucking ball!  In an actual
           game! - that was the third out to end their half of the inning, and my very first (and so far, only)
           out of the season

          -I felt pretty good about that, for about ten seconds - then everyone started to congratulate
           me - I know they were trying to be nice, and encouraging, and I know that I'm supposed to
           have enjoyed the praise and felt good about what I'd done, but it just ended up souring the
           whole experience for me - they were all so overly-congratulatory - "Wow!  Way to go, man!
           Good job!  I know you've been waiting for that one for a long time!  Awesome!  Great
           catch!" - even people on the other team were coming up and literally patting me on the back
           and saying "Great catch, man!" - but it wasn't a great catch! - it was the easiest catch in the
           fucking world! - and everyone overflowing with gratitude at my ability to not fuck up the easiest
           play of the game just seemed to exacerbate my humiliation

          -again, I know that I really should've taken the compliment for what it was and just been happy
           to receive the support and congratulations - and I honestly wish I could've - but it all just came
           across more like "Pats for Patrick" than honest praise for a job well-done

AT THE PLATE:

          -the first few games in the season I was kicking away, and getting on base a little less than
           half the time - then our coach decided we should all be bunting - my first bunting game went
           well, but since then it's been nothing but easy pop-outs caught by the pitcher or (even worse)
           the catcher, and I've only made it on base once with a bunt since that first game

          -so, this game, I decided to hell with my coach, I'm going to start kicking away again - unless
           I'm the first kicker in the inning, because strategy dictates that the first kicker should always
           bunt to try to get on base - besides, I've only been the first kicker in the inning one other time
           all season

          -I was the first kicker in the inning for both of my kicks this game

          -went ahead and bunted - both were easy outs - another dreaded pop-out caught by the
           catcher, and one where I actually managed to get off a bit of a kick, but they were just quicker
           than me and threw me out at 1st

FINAL:

          -we scored 1 run - they scored many, many, many more

INJURIES:

          -only emotional

Hunger Pains...

I'm still hungry all the time.  And it's really starting to get on my nerves.

I don't know what's causing this, but it started just after I stopped drinking, so I would imagine it must have something to do with that.  But is it a biochemical reaction?  Meaning, is it my body's autonomic response to being suddenly deprived of the ethyl alcohol it had grown accustomed to?  Or is it a behavioral response?  Is it just my head trying to fill the "Pleasure Yourself" gap left behind when I stopped drinking, with some new, more readily accessible form of pleasure?  I have no idea.

I've heard that a lot of people develop an insatiable sweet-tooth when they quit drinking, because their body is craving the sugar that they used to get from the alcohol.  (Our bodies metabolize alcohol into sugar.)  But that's not what I'm experiencing.  My problem is that I simply never stop feeling like I want to eat.  Normally, I would only get that feeling when I needed to eat.  And then, once I'd eaten, that feeling would go away, until the next time I needed to eat again.  But now, I can eat until I am bloated and feeling sick from the amount of food in my stomach, and I still have that feeling of "I want to eat."  It just never turns off!  And it's so fucking annoying!  It's like when you feel like you have to pee, even though your bladder is empty.  It's just this really unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling that will not go away, and that you cannot do anything about.

And I really, really just want it to stop.

I'm so tired of constantly fighting with myself to keep from over-eating.  I'm so tired of constantly wrestling with this phantom craving.  Every night it's the same thing.  As soon as I finish dinner, I want something sweet.  So, I eat a little dessert, and then as soon as I finish that, I want something salty-crunchy.  If I give in to that craving and eat something salty-crunchy (whole-wheat tortilla chips and 100-calorie packs of cheez-its are my current drugs of choice), then as soon as I finish that, I want something sweet again.  And if I give in to that, then I want something salty-crunchy/savory again.  And that just keeps going on and on forever until I end up passing out face-first into a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.

I'm currently working out and doing my best to eat as healthy as possible, in an attempt to lose some weight.  And I am losing weight, but much more slowly than I'd like.  And this shit is not making it any easier.

I've been trying to come up with ways to either satisfy and/or curb this craving that do not involve adding a bunch more calories to my daily intake.  Number one on the list is drinking lots and lots of water.  And I mean, to the point where I start to feel full.  That helps some, but not much, because the whole point of that trick is to curb your appetite by making your body feel full; and, of course, my whole problem is that my body is not currently responding correctly to that feeling.  And then there's the further drawback of having my day constantly and repeatedly interrupted by the painfully urgent need to piss violently.  I've thought about lo-to-no-cal snacks like rice cakes, but in the midst of these cravings, I can't bring myself to eat something completely tasteless that I am already well-aware I will not enjoy.  Still, I've found a couple of brands that are mildly tolerable, and I'm planning to try really hard to make them work.  I bought some lo-cal, high-protein jerky, as well, to try and help with the savory cravings.  The trick there is to just chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew until either it eventually turns to liquid in your mouth, or you feel like your jaw is going to fall off.  That way you get to spend a lot of time eating and enjoying the pleasure of tasting the salty/savory thing you're craving, but overall you don't actually eat that much food, or take in a lot of calories.  The sore jaw helps to put a damper on the desire to eat more, as well.  And at work, I've been having mid-afternoon Chai Lattes to try and help with my after-lunch cravings.  That seems to be working out ok.  It's not helping my need-to-pee-every-fifteen-minutes problem very much, though.

And there's one solution I've been trying out this week that is a little naughty.

I stopped smoking cigarettes over ten years ago.  And I cannot stand cigars.  But every Fall and Winter for the past six or seven years, pretty much as soon as the weather starts to turn cold, I smoke a pipe.  I really enjoy a good pipe during the cold half of the year.  I love the sweet, rich flavor of the tobacco.  I love its aromatic smell.  I love the ritual of loading, packing, tamping, lighting - everything has to be just right in order for it to work proper, but when it is, and when it does, oh, sweet ambrosia!  I even love the anachronism of it.  My grandfather smoked a pipe.  It just has this old, retro, even ancient feel to it, and I enjoy feeling like a part of that tradition.  And since I don't inhale pipe smoke, I don't have to worry as much about bronchial damage, emphysema, lung cancer, or even nicotine addiction, the way I did with cigarettes.  And since I indulge in it so rarely (even at the height of my smoking during that half of the year, I will smoke, at most, two pipes a day), I don't really have to worry about it much, at all.  It is a rather safe, and pleasurable, indulgence I can allow myself.  Especially compared to all of my other indulgences, which are so many times more harmful and dangerous.

So, it occurred to me, perhaps an after-dinner smoke would fill the void left behind by the absence of my customary after-dinner drink.  And, perhaps also help curb my appetite for my after-dinner snack - and my after-after-dinner snack, and my after-after-after-dinner snack - that is currently replacing my after-dinner drink.  I know, it's still not the healthiest solution in the world, but tasting (not inhaling) a little tobacco smoke is a lot less unhealthy than drinking, or over-eating.  So, I'll take what I can get.  (And everyone needs some sort of vice, don't they?  What's life without at least a little indulgence?)  But the problem is, as soon as the weather starts to warm up, I immediately lose all interest in smoking a pipe.  I don't know what it is, but it has been that way every single year since the very first.  It's not something I'm trying to do, intentionally.  That's just the way it works for me, for some reason.  I always want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year, and I only want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year.

But on Sunday, I found a solution to this problem.  There's a brand of small "cigars" (or "cigarillos," which is a rather annoying word) that are filled with pipe tobacco.  It's not the greatest pipe tobacco I've ever had, but it still tastes sweet, and smells nice, and it's infinitely better than cigar tobacco.  (I would rather eat old sushi than smoke a cigar.  Ugh!)  So every night so far this week I've smoked at least part of one of these "cigars" after dinner.  And I've enjoyed them alright, but not as much as my pipes.  And they've seemed to help with the cravings a little, but not as much as I'd hoped.  I'd hoped that they would come close to putting an end to the cravings, but I've found that just a little while after putting out the "cigar," I'm hungry again.  Still, the whole time I'm smoking, I don't want to eat.  And the cravings are a lot easier to resist for a while after the smoke.  So, all-in-all, one "cigar" seems to equal about an hour or so of not snacking.  So, it's not as much as I wanted, but it's not nothing, either.  We'll see how it goes.  I'm glad to have something enjoyable to do for now that seems to help at least a little, but I could also see myself getting bored with this very soon.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'm starting to get hungry.

Time for my Chai Latte.

Life on Mars?!...

"Scientists have discovered life on Mars."

Dozing on the couch early this morning, between snooze alarms, I hear that sentence come from the newscast on my television, and I am instantly awake.  My eyes pop open and I sit bolt-upright, throwing the blanket off my chest.

"Scientists are now saying they believe a lander sent over 30 years ago actually did discover life on Mars.  Now, this isn't the little-green-men kind of life, but they say they have found evidence of biological activity on the Red Planet.  In other news..."

"That's IT?!"

I'm all at once astounded, amazed, and outraged. We found life on another fucking planet - and not just any other planet, but one of the closest planets to us - and it gets a less-than-10-second blurb between the Weather and the latest update on the Gingrich "campaign"?  What the fuck is wrong with that picture?!

Finding life on Mars is a HUUUGE deal!  Astronomically huge, you could say, pun completely intended.  Because, first of all, finding any life anywhere else would change everything we now know about our place in the universe.  It would change the entire outlook of every single religion practiced by humanity!  For the first time in the entire history of life on Earth, we would know that we are not alone!  So, yeah, kind of a big deal.

But then to find life on Mars, specifically, would increase the importance of that discovery by an order of magnitude.  Because it could mean one of two things:  either, A) life actually began on Mars, and later traveled to Earth, essentially changing our entire concept of the origin of our species (for instance, a large asteroid slams into Mars, blowing chunks of it out into space, which later hit Earth as meteorites [we've already found Martian-meteorites in Antarctica]; and some of the bacteria or other organisms on some of those Martian-meteorites could've survived the trip, essentially becoming "seeds" that later flowered in our environment); or B) if life actually formed on two-out-of-eight planets in our incredibly-ordinary-solar-system - if we found evidence of a second genesis right next-door to us - then life must be incredibly common in the universe.

So hopefully you can understand why I'm a little upset that they didn't think this story warranted more than just a headline.

I have to know more.  So I grab my laptop and start searching the news feeds.  Doesn't take long to find an article that goes into a lot more depth.  And I'm disappointed (though, I hate to say, not surprised) to discover that once again, the media has simultaneously dumbed-down and overblown another science story.

No one has discovered any life on Mars.  The actual story, beyond the sensational headline, turns out to be that a team of mathematicians took another look at the hard-copy data of the soil samples taken by the two Viking landers back in 1976.  They analyzed these numbers to determine their level of complexity, using a new theory that biological systems are much more complex than non-biological ones.  And, using this new theory, they found data that was so complex, that they believe the only explanation is that it shows evidence of biological life-forms.

So, at most, what they've actually discovered is evidence of the possibility of some sort of biology on Mars, at some point.  Hardly the same thing as finding "life on Mars."  But then on top of that, this mathematical-complexity-theory of biological systems that they've based all of their findings on, hasn't even been proven to work on Earth!  So all of their findings are based on a method that they haven't even proven yet!

How in the fuck do you get from "mathematicians have used an unproven theory on 36 year-old data to suggest the possibility that life may have existed on Mars at some point" to "Scientists have discovered life on Mars?!"

Unfortunately, this is something I see time and again from the mainstream news media.  They did it with the whole "Large Hadron Collider May Create Black Hole and Destroy Earth" story (no, it won't).  And they did it again recently with the "Scientists Have Discovered Particles Traveling Faster Than Light" story (no, they didn't).  They never report actual scientific findings.  Instead, at the barest hint of only the most sensational stories (black holes gobbling up the planet, speed-of-light barrier broken, life on Mars, etc.) they jump all over it, remove anything resembling context, evidence, or truth, and splash the tabloid-esque headline across the front page or the evening newscast:  "Bat Boy Found on Mars Travelling Faster Than Light!  'Trying to Destroy Earth,' Say 'Scientists'!"

Ugh.

It's mornings like this that I weep for my species.

< /nerdrant >

"Sicilians are great liars..."

Oddly enough, "Drug addict" and "President of the United States" share one thing in common. Both titles, once earned, are yours forever, and can never be disowned.

I am a drug addict. Whether I use or not, I will always be a drug addict. The only difference between me and the sad sacks you see on shows like Intervention, is that I'm good at it. I am a smart, and successful drug addict. Those unfortunate people are ignorant, and weak, and they just seem to run headlong off the deep-end as quickly as possible. They don't have the knowledge or the will to keep from being completely consumed by their addiction, so they just go straight up in flames. It's not their fault (usually); it's just how things turned out for them. But I'm smart, and strong. And I have the intuitive understanding of addiction that can only come from being raised by a family of drug addicts. I am a GREAT fucking drug addict.

I'm still killing myself. Obviously. No different from those pathetic zombies on the TV; not in the end. But see, I know what I'm doing. I know how to make it laaaast. I know how to keep it from killing me too quickly, so that I can continue to use. Make it take as long as possible so that I can suck every single molecule of meaningless, masturbatory bio-pharmacological bliss out of it before it inevitably kills me.

THAT is the mark of a great addict. Exerting only just enough control to keep it going, to make it last, but not enough to stop. "We called him 'Mother Superior' on account of the length of his habit." Too much control and you quit, and the fun's over, and you live a long, boring life of wishing you could get high; too little, and you end up dying of the DT's in the gutter before you ever even get to live.

I want to live as long as possible. But I also want to feel good as much of that life as I possibly can. I know, in the end, that I'll die screaming. But will I regret the choices that brought me there? I mean, honestly - doesn't everyone scream when they die? Still, the greatest addict who ever lived, was still just a fucking junkie when you get right down to it. How am I any different?

We're defined by how we live, not how we die. (Unless you end up winning a Darwin award.) I never felt a need to be great. Never had any desire to change the world, or "leave my mark" for future generations. I just want to live my life with as little pain, and as much pleasure, as I possibly can. And so, every day, I get up and walk that line between living well and dying young.

I'm not sure where it's leading me, but the view is breath-taking. On both sides.

If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Love...

If someone cannot devastate you, then you don't Love them.

Ok, you might love them a little, as in liking-them-more-than-anyone-else, but you don't really *Love* them. Not reflexively-die-for-them Love. Not opening-yourself-completely or trusting-absolutely Love. That kind of Love, what all the poets call "true" Love, can only exist along with the possibility of extreme emotional distress.

Once you lay yourself open like that, losing yourself completely in someone else, then you have handed that person the power to completely devastate you. That's a huge part of what Love is: laying your heart in someone else's hands and trusting that they won't hurt it. And when they give you their heart in return? Well then you can begin to understand how a bunch of balding monkeys rutting in the dirt could come up with an idea like "Heaven."

Or, less poetically, Loving someone is, in large part, about giving them a portion of the responsibility for your emotional well-being, and trusting that they won't abuse that power or otherwise fuck it up and hurt you. And the totally absurd thing is, THEY ALWAYS DO.

It's inevitable. There's no way to avoid it. Once we fall in Love, that person IS, inevitably, at some point, going to torture us in ways that we could never have imagined before. It's not necessarily intentional. (Sometimes it is. Some people are assholes. Hell, some fish are assholes. Just simply a fact of life as sure as the turning of worlds.) It's just that, as with pretty much everything other than "food good" and "pain bad", we aren't born knowing what to do. If we're lucky, by the time we fall in Love we've managed to figure out how to basically work our own hearts without too much difficulty. But how the fuck can we know how to handle someone else's safely? We've never done it before. And everyone's heart is different! There's no way we can get it right on the first shot. We have to learn how to take care of that heart, specifically. And we can't do that without learning what's Right and what's Wrong for that heart. We've got to make mistakes in order to figure out how to NOT make mistakes.

And those learning-mistakes to us, are emotional traumas to the ones we Love; leaving life-long emotional scars in the person we cherish more than any other human being alive. And by Loving them in return, by opening ourselves up to them and making ourselves completely vulnerable and open as only truly-Loving another person absolutely can, we allow them to scar us in the same way. Sometimes worse.

But funny enough, we don't seem to care. We keep putting ourselves in the same situation over-and-over-again, anyways. Ever since we invented the word "Love", we have sought it out obsessively and without reason, and regardless of consequence. Is it just biology? Are we just crazy? Is it something more? Or less? Is it some basic make-up in our psychology that demands to be expressed, or is it simply that the chemicals in our brains that shape our bodies into a particular binary form somehow demand to be exercised? (I.e., testosterone + estrogen = orgasm.) Fuck, I don't know, maybe it's just me. I've been slit-my-wrists, suck-a-gun-barrel miserable for about 80% of the last month because of Her. (If we go back 3-6 months, up that to 90%.) But that other 20%? Oh, gods, what a 20%! There's never been a greater fifth of a whole in all of man's experience! And I would die a tortuous death a thousand times before I let you take that 20% away from me. Just the memory of the seemingly endless joys Her Love brings me makes it feel as though any amount of pain is more than a fair price to pay.

And I think that's what it comes down to. At least for me, anyways.

In the end, 20% of Heaven, is worth 80% of Hell.

And then some.